Midweek Mention... Shutter Island

Shutter Island

Sidey: Not a continuation of Island Week. No. Although, kind of is. Yeah. This is

Does this fit? Are we going for night week?

a coincidence,

Reegs: at the end that Stephen Knight had written the original draft of this movie, the start of Night

Sidey: week but

Reegs: But I wanted to challenge myself after we talked last week about Shutter Island and I remember kinda not liking that movie. Scorsese

Yeah, and there was a couple of things I didn't like. Fantasy, we talked about last week. So I was like, all right, let's challenge. It's either an act of self loathing or an act of challenge. But here we are.

Sidey: flagellation.

Yeah.

Dan: How was your viewing experience? This film, like the actual setting, because mine was broken. I was away. I watched part of it and then watched the second half, or the last third anyway, on really dodgy internet.

I had seen this before

Sidey: yeah same

Dan: the way through, but. Whether that detracted from my viewing pleasure. Well, it certainly did because it was a really poor

Reegs: it's really poor quality. No, I remember not thinking it was as good

Dan: No, I remember not thinking it was as good as it could have been or should have been with those that duo, you know, Scorsese and DiCaprio, but yeah, we, we settled, saddled, saddled up and,

Sidey: I saw it at the multiplex and this time just at home, but I was interrupted after about an hour and 15 by someone who was intoxicated and needed a

lift.

Dan: was

Reegs: okay.

Sidey: was broken up, but yeah,

Dan: at And so it was broken up. It

Reegs: It starts with what sounds like a foghorn.

Bum, bum, bum. Which continues all the way through the movie. And a ship coming through the fog. And our hero. Lead

character. Leonardo DiCaprio as Teddy Daniels. A

What is

Sidey: U.

S.

Reegs: S. Marshal.

Sidey: just

Dan: He's just washing his face.

He looks like he's

Reegs: he's been

Dan: a

Sidey: he's been chundering.

Reegs: And they turn up on and pretty quickly like the score is going crazy and it's all this like the looming gothic sort of architecture of the ashcliff hospital for the criminally insane on shutter island.

Sidey: Yeah, you don't want to end up there.

Reegs: No,

Dan: No, it was the fog and the stony kind of landscape that the island gives off.

There's only one bay at the front that you can launch in and arrive from.

Reegs: He's got

Sidey: Yeah, he's there, he's got Mark Ruffalo with

Reegs: Yeah, his

Sidey: Their new partners, yeah.

Reegs: And they've, they've never met before and they're there ostensibly under under the guise of investigating a missing woman, Rachel Solondo.

A patient there at the hospital.

Sidey: Because we get some As they do as they investigate. Yeah, it doesn't seem Feasible how she's been able to get away. She's locked in at night. Yeah The way she's to get out she would have had to go past and so there's all these things going on I mean like

Reegs: Well, there

Sidey: it's a real mystery

Reegs: fuck of a lot going on because almost from the get go, Ruffalo is very suspicious. He fumbles his gun at the gate, like, clearly, like, demonstrating that he is not a policeman, right? And you're supposed to pick up on this stuff. You don't have to be very observant to see. And there are a number of interactions that occur with Ben Kingsley as Dr.

Sidey: sir Ben Kingsley. He's a, he's a knight

Reegs: Yeah, he's a knight. Yeah. Yeah

Yeah, did you get some of those for them? Yeah nice

there's a number of interactions that occur with the staff and all that that border from uncooperative to something else, hinting at something, some other thing taking place. And in the whole atmosphere anyway, it's this kind of weird, pulpy like B movie thing because we're set in the

Dan: don't think there will be top hats in this movie as far as

Reegs: I don't think there are any top hats in this movie as far as

Dan: There's a dino. A

Sidey: With a monocle.

Dan: Yeah.

Reegs: So he does lead an investigation.

They're trying to find stuff out. It just so happens that the lead psychiatrist for this woman, Dr. Sheehan, they let him leave on the ferry this morning, which obviously he's pissed off

Dan: about. Yeah, as he's investigating the case, the pieces aren't fitting. And he's pretty convinced there's you know, a conspiracy going on. There's an ulterior motive to everybody's actions. And he's questioning everyone.

He's starting to trust less and less

Sidey: motive to everybody's actions, and he's

Reegs: A, B and

Sidey: everyone, and he's starting to trust less and less And it and it would be constantly like being shown this lighthouse thing. Yeah, what's going on in there?

Reegs: Also Teddy is a troubled man himself. We see that he has flashbacks to the liberation of Dachau. He was one of the first American soldiers there, and he participated in a war crime when they massacred, a bunch of German

Dan: Yeah, well he came in on the the, the commandant, or, or whatever it was, that, of, And he had shot himself, hadn't he?

Reegs: He tried to kill himself.

Dan: it hadn't worked and he was just bleeding out there on the on the and it you see him staring down at him And slowly start moving the gun away from him so he can't finish the job and

Reegs: just let him die slower. I think he has that flashback after sort of seeing the portrait of hitler in the office of he has that conversation with max von siddow, who's another one of the people there and you know appears to be like it's hinted at strongly through the dialogue and through other things that he's like part of a Plot to a sort of Nazi plot

Sidey: This Mengler type character here. Yeah, exactly.

Reegs: carrying on the work of Nazi scientists.

at this

Sidey: the institution.

Dan: And we have a night out where Ruffalo and His character is? Teddy. No, Mark Ruffalo.

Reegs: His character,

Dan: Chuck, yeah, so they go out, don't they, and explore the island. And at one point,

he's determined to go down to explore further than Chuck wants to go.

Yeah.

Reegs: Well, we need to get there's a, there's a bit about halfway. He's also troubled through visions of his wife that he sees.

He keeps seeing her sometimes like in water and there's like a chunk missing out of her as well. You have a backside or whatever. So, yeah, he see that eventually he wants to get into Ward C

Dan: say to chuck that his wife has died.

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: Those flashbacks are pretty like explicitly telling you something's fucking wrong. Yeah.

Reegs: the movie's pretty heavy handed in its, in its use of, you know, it's not a real surprise,

Dan: surprise. Yeah, so, so basically Teddy's having all these, these visions as he's in this, in this hospital for the criminally

Reegs: And he's trying to do these interviews with people and other inmates there. He meets at one point somebody who claims to be Rachel Solondo and then he sort of has a vision of what she did. Her crime was to drown her children. And she's like a fantasist and everybody enables that world who knows if that's foreshadowing of something else.

And eventually he wants to get into block C, which is where the movie picks up a pace. This is the place that they didn't, they were told not to go into. And he's been chasing the reason that he's there is he's chasing a guy called. Andrew Leidis. He's got his own motivations for being on Shutter Island.

Eddie Daniels, he's chasing Andrew Leidis. And he was the man that he blames for killing his wife and children. So he thinks, he believes him to be via this other guy, Noice, that he's heard it from in Block C of Shutter Island. So that's why he needs to get in there.

Dan: Yeah. And, and the reason I'd mentioned this storm earlier, because all their clothes got wet and they had to change into what only thing that they had, which was the, the uniform of, of the patients or the inmates.

So both he Chuck and and Teddy addressed now like they're,

though they're still carrying on the

investigation.

Sidey: Mm-Hmm. . Yeah.

Reegs: I think there's an altercation with another prisoner and the prisoner has to be escorted back, which is, which happens by like a security guard and Mark Ruffalo's character and DiCaprio is left to wander by himself, which is when he ends up going to visit.

Hey, what's his name? Jackie

Dan: Jackie Chan.

Sidey: Jack. Oh, Haley. George.

Reegs: Earl Haley, that's the guy. Who seems to know him and tells, gives him these revelations, doesn't he? About lot of experiments going on.

Sidey: of yeah, there's these weird experiments going on. Yeah in the lighthouse.

Yeah

Dan: And, he

Reegs: And he tells him not to trust Chuck, basically. He's like, you don't know who this guy is all this stuff. So this is what sets him off for the final stretch of the movie. He doesn't start to trust the people around

Dan: of the movie, he doesn't start to trust the people

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: him. There's all those rats

Sidey: rocks. doesn't

Dan: Yeah, she's in a cave.

And it's The is it Rachel Solando? That is the, that is the woman. She's been hiding in a cave

Reegs: hiding in a

Dan: around. They haven't been able to catch her on the island. She still looks fabulous though. She isn't you

Sidey: Doesn't look like she's been living in a

Dan: doesn't look like she's been living in a cave, but they have this long

kind of drawn out plan and experiment and she's telling her what he's

Reegs: she used to be a doctor there and then became a patient and she says they're doing experiments on mind control. And then she was like, you know, altering reality. And so she was forcibly committed there. She says to him, Marshall, you have no friends, which was a bit harsh.

I know she was saying, trust no one, but it was a bit harsh. I thought,

Sidey: Yeah, kick a man while he's down.

Reegs: Yeah. So, and she, she warns him. She says, Oh, they're going to use all your trauma and shit against you, and they're going to have you committed. And before long, you're going to be like lobotomized or whatever.

Dan: And that's what that yeah, she is she's kind of confirming his own conspiracy theories

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: Well he is eventually after this, picked up by one of the security

Reegs: Did you see who

Dan: Is

it biff?

Reegs: help me

Dan: Yeah, yeah.

Sidey: Oh, is it Ted Levine? Yeah, that

Dan: Yeah that guy, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, he wearing his skin suit. So He gives him quite a bit A strange talk and tells him, you know, that he's known him centuries and are you the kind of guy that would, you know,

fight

if you had to, or would you walk away and he goes, no, you and I, you and I, we would, you know, strike first.

And he said at one point, if I reach over and bite your eye

How will you react to something? And he goes, well try it. And

Reegs: He calls them both men of violence.

Yeah. He said, we're both men of violence. He says. So, anyway, they end up back at I think he ends up going to the lighthouse, doesn't he? And this is where

he

Sidey: goes originally they've been they've been trying to go with chuck And they got separated chuck's body on the rocks and it's I think it's salado Salando whether than her name is that says no he was never

a partner

Reegs: that was no, that was Kingsley tells him that, doesn't he? When he gets back to the hospital,

Dan: which was a spooky part then

Reegs: yeah, he's like, you never had a partner.

Dan: is starting to fall.

And you're

Reegs: Well, it's gaslighting of the, like, most horrendous,

Dan: Yeah. You're starting to think what's going on in this island. You know, there is part of the film now that at least wants you to believe that that there might be a conspiracy of the whole. Everybody on the island and it's what Rachel Solander says everybody all the inmates all the The interns all the everybody is in on it.

And he's it. So then he hears he doesn't have a partner.

Reegs: He has an altercation with the Nazi guy which further cements the idea in his head that it's a big conspiracy because he sees the guy's got a sedative in his pocket and all the way through, Max von Sydow has clearly not been as committed to, you know, What will eventually to be the truth of this as, as anybody else.

So, anyway, he goes to the lighthouse eventually. That's where he gets to. He knows that that's where the truth of this will come out.

Dan: Yeah, to get there, he, he creates a diversion and blows up Sir Ben Kingsley's car. He gets another vision then of he's Daughter and wife and then dives into the water, swims over, knocks out the guard takes his gun, goes through the the, the lighthouse room by room.

So as it goes up this circular

Reegs: I really love

Dan: is a lovely

Reegs: goes going up this, it was like twisting and turning the camera as it follows the staircase up, it was great.

Dan: Yeah, and each room he bursts in and does the full surveillance, looks behind the door. He's there are only small rooms until he gets to the top and he's, he's kind of shaking because right at the top is, the door is closed and he bursts through it and Sir Ben Kingsley's there telling him to warm up

Reegs: Well, it's confusing at first, right? Because you're expecting it to be this hospital where all these things are happening and it's just a bare room and Kingsley sat at a desk you know,

Dan: desk you know, so you can But happily he does have a whiteboard

Reegs: But happily does have a whiteboard to show him. Some anagrams that he's had prepared. Here's some ones that I

Dan: It's some Yeah. And that is that he is actually really a patient there and part of his delusion has been all this story that to save him from being lobotomized he thought it better to try this experimental new attempt to to bring him into consciousness and and awaken from these delusions by playing out this fantasy of him being a

Sidey: so he's not Teddy? No, he is the Andrew.

Reegs: He's Andrew Leidis that they've been looking for. And you get this, you know, when the truth comes it kind of overwhelms him. His partner comes back in, Chuck comes back in, he's Dr Sheehan the whole time.

Dan: backs it all up.

Reegs: so, and he kind of, I think he kind of faints and you get the

Sidey: He does faint.

Yeah. Yeah.

Reegs: of what actually happened.

Which is his wife had a psychotic breakdown. And

Sidey: killed the kids

Reegs: when he came home from work, he was already in a drunk, abusive husband anyway, kind of thing. But he came back and then he shot and killed her. So that's what ended up committing there. And then he lived out this fantasy of chasing Andrew Leidis.

He was, he created this new personality, Teddy Daniels.

Sidey: like a personality disassociation or something like that.

Reegs: And so, but the treatment is to essentially indulge that fantasy as far as they can and let it play out.

Dan: Yeah, as, as, as a last ditch effort

Reegs: exactly.

Dan: because he was going to be lobotomized

Reegs: So it's supposed to be an act of kindness and like, you know, showing that transition from, from

Dan: And Sir Ben Kingsley really wants this to work and there's different chemical drugs coming into play now that have had various bits of success with some patients, but

Sidey: Chlorpromazine.

Dan: Yeah. But the Max von Snyder or he's, he's up for lobotomy, what he wants to do. And so we wake up on the bed and they, they bring him up and he's, he asked for, for Rachel, Rachel and, or his wife and, and then it comes back to

Reegs: it's the daughter, because it's really the memory of his daughter that propels him to accept the, the, the, the truth of what they're saying,

Dan: Yeah,

and he does, and he's able to recall it and inf in front of everybody and they're saying, look, we need to hear you say it. And he's saying, I made the guy up to protect myself and all the kind of explanation that we've been watching through the film of this deeply traumatized man who created a split personality for himself, essentially to mask the pain of this terrible act that he'd been a part of.

And He was then told that nine months ago, he had a similar

Reegs: breakthrough,

Dan: breakthrough, but then relapsed.

Sidey: Yeah.

Dan: And so they said, look, we, we got to keep an eye on you. You know, we're not sure serious, you've hurt

Sidey: Yeah, he's violent. He's violent in the hospital.

You've

Dan: really hurt people because you're trained. You're a, you're a trained combat

Sidey: marshal.

Dan: a soldier.

So,

Reegs: A man of violence.

Dan: man of violence. Yeah. And you realize all these interactions with everybody's had, they've all been part of this huge ruse for, for him to, to come through this. And at different times where you've met the patients, they've obviously been hard to control. One woman had written run, but because they're all, you know, Kind of, confused themselves.

They, they weren't that much help to him at that time. And just further muddying the waters really. So,

Reegs: so, but getting back to things.

So he accepts all this stuff and all that and they're brilliant. Excellent. And then it sort of cuts to him out on the step and Chuck or Dr. Sheen goes over to see him and suddenly he's back in the Teddy persona. Hey

Sidey: him Chuck, doesn't he?

Reegs: come on Chuck, we've gotta start investigating this place. I was playing it cool and all that sort of stuff, and really disappointed, Lee, you know, Ruffalo.

Kind of shakes his head and then looks to Kingsley and Von Sydow, who are over the moon to lobotomize him.

Dan: well they're, they're, they are, they, they're straight away like, well

Reegs: No, Kingsley's, Kingsley's more reticent,

Dan: no

Reegs: Sydow's jerking off, I think.

Dan: But yeah,

Reegs: But then, no, there's a great, because it all sums it up for that great final line that he says to him, just as he walks away Teddy Daniels, Andrew Leidis, talks, says back to Ruffalo,

Sidey: Is it better to live as a monster or die as a good man?

Reegs: Sort of, you know, probably I, they said it's like an ambiguous enemy. I think that line takes all the ambiguity out of it.

Dan: A hundred

Sidey: explicit, yeah.

Reegs: he's led off to the

Dan: Well, He kind

of gets up to stop and say something, Ruffalo, going, wait

a

Sidey: a minute! Yeah,

Dan: goes, I know exactly what you're doing here.

You know, you, you, you. You're just so gutted with this, you haven't came to terms with it, you're prepared to be lobotomized because you want to hide from the pain of it all. Yeah, it was pretty heavy handed, it wasn't, and a lot sort of film was for me, you know, that it gave it away far too quickly now I've seen it once before, it's, it's kind of now you know the secret and anybody listening to this now, you know, the secret and you

Sidey: watch it. So, but the point

Reegs: So, but the point is To watch him come to understand that I think that's what I did this time.

So the first time I watched it That was what bugged me about it But you watch it is so obvious that everything's being said it's to watch Lydus do it. I don't it's got it's like pulpy and ridiculous this

Dan: It's a brilliant performance by DiCaprio at times. Some of the scenes I've, I've seen him in, I just think what a great actor, like, because, but it didn't seem like he had a, like the, the scene particularly as he's coming to realization.

I think there was, and that's right towards the end of the film. But I really liked those scenes with him. I thought, oh, wow, there's, there were closeup shots and he was,

Sidey: It is good. I don't think this is, I don't think this is his best work, but I, you know, I've been one of the ones who've been a bit more explicit about my dislike for this film, having seen it just the once, but watching it again, trying to go into it you know, with an open mind I just don't enjoy it for me.

Like the film, Is just really like grim and bleak and to me obvious that something's gonna happen So you're sitting waiting for if you can't work it out. You're still sitting there waiting for the reveal I don't think it it doesn't build up really any tension there's some good performances in it and what have you but I just didn't know it didn't improve for me watching it the second time

Dan: didn't improve for me watching

Sidey: than live with

Dan: a second time. It's

Reegs: It's so weird, but it's so unlike anything else Scorsese has ever done, because it's like this gothic, pulpy, ridiculous 50s thing, and it's like a mystery,

Dan: it's like a mystery. I

Reegs: enjoyed it though, I've got to say, I reappraise this to say that because getting the worry of like, Trying to understand whether you're ahead of the plot or whether that is the plot.

And once you understand that you can just settle back into this like weird character study of this like crazy guy and then it's got so many poetic modes. It's got that music, that violin music that was used in everything afterwards.

Sidey: And

Reegs: plenty of crying and stuff

Dan: but you you're right that that part of it is a character of a man who's You know, you know Insane or delusional and and going through that

Sidey: realism.

Well, yeah, a moment of

Dan: a moment of

Reegs: Crime of passion or whatever the

Sidey: know that it's, I'd say it's almost fairly rational

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's it was a horrible crime like, you know, and it was all

Reegs: I

think what it, right, the first time I was watching, I was like this, I think I know what's going on and it's all so ridiculous that, you know, like it doesn't, it's contrived and it relies so much on like circus.

But once you understand that's like part of the pulpy feel of it, then you can kind of let that go and just enjoy the story. So, yeah,

Dan: I

Reegs: I actually going to go for a strong recommend on this as a

Dan: Oh, strong

Reegs: I enjoyed

Sidey: yeah huge massive

Dan: Go for